Years of Red Dust (5 page)

Now Bao wrote full-time in his
tingzijian
room, which had a curtained window above one of the lane's common sinks. While washing in the sink, the housewives in the lane could not help standing on tiptoe and peering in. He was seen reading seriously with a pair of glasses, making notes, thumbing through a large dictionary half the size of the table in his room. He came less and less to our evening talk at the lane entrance. When he did, he began speaking
like a man of letters, flashing out new terms like “revolutionary realism” and “revolutionary romanticism,” which scintillated like his new silver tooth. Soon there were several other poems in the newspapers. In one poem, he said that “we proletariat cannot be tofu-hearted toward the class enemy,” which became an instant catchphrase. Another poem written in angry denouncement of the bourgeois intellectuals made its way into textbooks.

 

They're no stinking tofu—
Stinking not only in smell,
Rotten in taste too.
Oh, nothing but poop.

 

At a subsequent lecture given at a college, Bao met a young student fan of his poems, who then married him. All this happened so fast, so magically, as if with a drop of the chemical coagulant in the soybean liquid, tofu was made.

The lane had hardly registered her first visit when she started cooking in the common kitchen as Mrs. Bao. But such speed was not too surprising that year, when Mao said that one day is equivalent to twenty years in China's socialist revolution and construction. When in Bao's company, she made a point of having a black notebook and a red pen with her. The moment he said something unusual, she would write it down. On several occasions, it was said, she succeeded in turning his random remarks into poems and having them published as the latest masterpieces.

One summer evening, the newlyweds were sitting out in the lane, sharing a large piece of watermelon. Like other wives there, Mrs. Bao was trying to collect the watermelon seeds, which could later be fried as a tasty snack, but Bao stopped her.

“Look at the watermelon,” he said, spitting the rind into his palm. “Not sweet at all, so dead pale in color, and look at the watermelon seeds too, so small, so deformed. Such a seed can only grow into such a tiny, pathetic watermelon.”

“Look at your face,” she said sweetly, by way of a joke. “All your pimples stand out like the watermelon seeds.”

It did not take long, however, for her to produce under his name a new poem, which was apparently modeled after the first poem he had composed while still working in the steel plant.

 

What kind of seeds grow what kind of melons.
What kind of vines produce what kind of flowers.
What kind of people do what kind of things.
What kind of classes speak what kind of languages.

 

The poem brought even larger credit to Bao. More significantly, in the poem he moved beyond the central image of tofu—an important shift, since his neighbors had doubted Bao's ability to make poetry like tofu. The wife basked in the glory of the husband.

People now supposed that Bao was going to move to a better area as a result of his elevated status. But he didn't,
and his wife joked about his fondness for the feng shui of their
tingzijian
room. After all, it was here that Bao had enjoyed his turn of luck. So Bao, as a nationally known worker poet, was assigned an additional room on the second floor in the same
shikumen
house, through a special arrangement, which his wife declared he deserved.

The neighbors started to call him Worker Poet Bao. He answered to it with a prompt smile and with a new song that the radio played during our evening talk. It was entitled “The Working Class Are Strong-Backboned”:

 

We the working class are strong-backboned.
Following Chairman Mao, we march forward,
With the country and the world in our heart,
We do not stop on the road of the revolution.
Self-reliant and working hard,
We do not stop along the road of the construction.
Holding the red flags high, we move on courageously.
We're the locomotive of the new era.

 

“As in an old Chinese saying, when fortune comes your way, there's no stopping it,” Old Root commented.

“Room, wife, and fame—what a metamorphosis through a stroke of fortune!” Four-Eyed Liu joined in. “All because of tofu.”

“Tofu or no tofu, there's no pushing away your fortune,” Old Root followed with a more profound comment, “but how fortune eventually works out, you never know.”

This is the last issue of
Red Dust Lane Blackboard Newsletter
for the year 1964. Having weathered the “three years of natural disasters,” China has made new, gigantic progress in the socialist revolution and socialist construction. As Chairman Mao pointed out, over the past fifteen years, literature and art associations and their publications have failed to carry out Party politics, having actually slid to the brink of revisionism in recent years. So it is necessary to talk about class struggle every year, every month, every day. In October, China successfully exploded its first atom bomb, and the Chinese government proposed to convene an international conference to discuss the prohibition and destruction of nuclear weapons. On the international front, Premier Zhou Enlai set forth the basic principles for China's support to the other countries.

In 1964, Lihua failed the college entrance examination.

To be fair to him, his scores were not that bad—they were even slightly higher than the enrollment acceptance level—but he suffered from a disadvantage. In the “class status” column of the college application form, he had to put his father down as a clerk “with historical problems,” because the older man had been an activist in a student organization associated with the Nationalist government before 1949. It was a political stain that, though not serious enough to put the old man on the blacklist of the new society, cast a shadow on Lihua's horizon. Melong, another student from Red Dust Lane, entered Shanghai Teachers College with a score actually lower than Lihua's, because of his worker family background. There was a Party policy frequently quoted in the newspapers:
Family background counts, but not absolutely. What counts more is young people's own political performance.
The second sentence was generally regarded, however, as no more than a decorative veneer.

Still, Lihua's parents wanted him to have another try the following year. Or, as an alternative, to start working in a small eatery through the early retirement arrangement of his father, who had worked there for more than twenty years, standing by a concrete sink in a pair of black rubber shoes, washing dishes from morning to evening. Lihua was not eager to get into his father's shoes, which the old man would kick off the first thing when he arrived
back home, revealing water-soaked feet as pallid as salted fat pork. So Lihua made a halfhearted attempt to review the test books, not believing that the second time would make any difference. Instead, he started to play Chinese chess in earnest, trying to bury his head like an ostrich in the world of chess—at least for a while.

Spending four or five hours daily at the chessboard, Lihua soon found himself turning into a top player in Red Dust Lane. At a tournament outside the lane, he was “discovered” by Zhu Shujian, a white-haired chess master who had retired from the Shanghai City Chess Team. Zhu saw great potential in Lihua. Though not ready to acknowledge him as a student yet, Zhu started to take him to competitions among the higher-level players. Unexpectedly, Lihua saw a career option far more tempting than his father's, if he could become a member of the Shanghai City Chess Team. The chessboard presented the possibility of a different world to him, one in which he did not have to worry about his family background, so long as he calculated every move on the board, like with a math problem.

On a July morning, Lihua followed Zhu to a cobble-covered street in the old city section, where Wan Liang was going to play against several challengers in a wheellike succession. A member of the Shanghai City Chess team in the fifties and a runner-up in a national tournament several years ago, Wan had suddenly disappeared from the scene a while back. Lihua was thrilled at the prospect of meeting this legendary figure.

The game had been set up in front of a dingy hot-water shop near the end of the street. Normally, such a game would be held inside the shop, where people could smoke, drink, and sometimes eat as well. The decision to have it outside was probably due to Wan's name, which would draw a larger audience. There were five or six thermos bottles lined up along the curb, and the owner of the hot-water shop, a plump man surnamed Han, an enthusiastic amateur chess player, was rubbing his hands, beaming with pride.

Wan Liang was a gaunt, grizzle-haired man with a constant smile revealing his tea-and-cigarette-stained teeth. He straddled one end of a wooden bench, while his opponent perched on the other end and the chessboard sat between them. There was a tall, worn bamboo broom leaning against the wall behind Wan like an exclamation mark. Stripped to the waist in his black homespun shorts and wooden slippers, Wan appeared sallow, malnourished, his ribs visible like a board in the glaring daylight. They looked like frets on a stringed instrument, and they reminded Lihua of a Shanghai expression: it's possible to play the pipa on his ribs.

Wan was unquestionably a master of the chessboard, but his manner was surprising. He kept lifting one bare foot, and then another, onto the bench. Clasping the yellow sole of his foot in one hand, he held a huge sticky rice ball in the other, unaware of the grain stuck on his nose tip.

What's more, Wan applauded his own moves and criticized
his opponent's loudly. With the audience talking, cursing, laughing alongside, Wan seemed to build ever-increasing momentum on the chessboard, peppering the game with sarcastic remarks, making it hard for his opponent to concentrate.

“My horse, it is really galloping in the skies, but the stinking positioning of your soldier really reeks like a dog shit,” Wan said, busy nodding or munching at his rice ball. “The way you move your piece—exactly the way a blind man rides a blind horse along a steep cliff on a dark, stormy night. Your head must have been stuffed with straw.”

Lihua was growing more and more uncomfortable. After years, if he had the potential and studied hard, he might be able to play a masterful hand like Wan—maybe even as a member of the City Chess Team. But then what?

Wan was like a down-and-out Don Quixote, an old man stripped of his shining armor, holding a broken lance, fighting one absurd battle after another with imagined dignity. Still, Wan was a powerful player, and his tactics, which were not aboveboard, also helped. His tactics of distraction brought unbearable pressure on his opponent, who was befuddled into making one blunder after another. The third game that morning was finished in less than ten minutes.

Lihua didn't know exactly how the challenge matches were arranged. It appeared that each of the challengers had the opportunity to play one or two games with Wan, while at the other end of the bench a line of new challengers waited. Soon, however, there was only one left, a sturdy
middle-aged man surnamed Pan, with a bald head, bushy eyebrows, and a determined expression in his beady eyes. Pan played slowly, stubbornly, thinking long and hard before making a single move, in a sharp contrast to Wan's carefree style. Wan started to show his impatience through a variety of new gestures—tapping his fingers at the edge of the board, breathing audibly into the cup, turning to examine the clock inside the hot-water shop . . .

As Pan was holding a cannon piece in the air, debating with himself for several minutes about where to fire, Wan commented with a sardonic smile, “Charge forward, Amier.” It was a witty reference to the movie
The Visitor from the Ice Mountains
and the character Amier, a young naïve man too shy to express his love. The audience burst out laughing. Pan's face went scarlet, and he put the cannon down in a surprising position, making a fatal threat to Wan.

Abruptly Wan stood up and left, carrying the bamboo broom, uttering a fragmented sentence—“Got to go”—and hurrying across the street.

No one seemed to be puzzled by this except Lihua. It was not polite, to say the least, for Wan to leave in the middle of the game. Was it possible that he, too, had to think long and hard about his countermove in this critical situation? Could it have been a face-saving trick?

Wan came back in about twenty minutes, throwing down the bamboo broom like a broken lance and, as if without thinking, pushing his castle to the bottom line.
It was a brilliant counterstroke, immediately turning the table. Pan perspired profusely, his face flushing and his fingers trembling.

“What's that?” Wan said, sniffing vigorously. “It smells like a fermented winter melon.”

Lihua did not smell anything. Looking around, he noticed one of the onlookers holding a bowl of watery rice in his hand, but he did not see any fermented winter melon in the bowl. “Winter melon?” he mumbled, recalling that it was something like a special pickle for Ningbonese, but the others broke out in guffaws. Lihua realized it was another insulting remark in reference to Pan's skill.